King Crimson – The Power To Believe (2003)

A recent late night Ebay trawl yielded this album, King Crimson's last release of original music (so far). I hadn't previously heard this, so I've no history with this one.

And while this isn't going to be remembered as a KC classic, nor featuring in arguments about favourite Crim albums, contained within are some very welcome sounds.

The four parts of The Power To Believe are the head, spine and tail of the album, but they aren't the stand out. That's Level Five, the most Crimson thing on the album, a powering, stop start instrumental, which seems to be a coda to the Larks' Tongues In Aspic series of pieces. Eyes Wide Open is a Belew soft-rock song adapted in the KC way of doing things, but it's not strong. Electrik is a listenable, but unremarkable rising theme at first, but typical of KC, it develops into something more powerful and bombastic.

Facts Of Life is a two parter, firstly an ambient soundscape, with the main course a growling industrial guitar piece, with vocal section that reminds me of I May Not Have Had Enough Of Me But I've Had Enough Of You from Fripp's solo album Exposure.

Next is the meat in the sandwich, The Power To Believe II. The first part was a short acapella vocoder taster of the verse, which, after a long percussion/synth intro is repeated accompanied here in a piece which feels like it's building up to something but doesn't get there yet. Dangerous Curves is another instrumental, which develops into something dark and interesting as it progresses, before penultimate track Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With, a big metal self-referential song, where the joke is interesting at first, but this sort of thing has been done before and better, Mr Belew.

And to conclude, it's back to the final two parts of The Power To Believe. Starting again with the vocal intro, there's a discordant guitar led instrumental before the coda, a gentle Fripp soundscape with a reprise of the vocal.

I'd imagine at the time, this satisfied Crimsonheads in that they got some new material, without overexciting them. Nevertheless, there is enough variety and excitement to merit further exploration.

Link to album tracks

3* - this has grown on me after a couple of listenings, but there's not quite enough strong Crimson sound for that fourth star.